Five Reasons I’m Breaking Up With Your Online Store

We have something we need to talk about. It’s not you, it’s not me, it’s your website. Unless you’re targeting people with way too much time on their hands, your site needs a complete overhaul. Consider me one of the legions of disgruntled web shoppers who’ve had it up to their https with underperforming sites. But in the interest of fairness, I wanted to let you in on the top five offenses—all of which you are guilty of. Who knows, maybe you’ll rise to ecommerce occasion and win me back.

Offense #1: Bugginess
The technical term might be flawed functionality, but if your calculator doesn’t calculate, your videos don’t play, or your interactive product view doesn’t budge, don’t clog up my shopping trip with it. It’s simple—fix it or take it down. Would you buy from a storefront with broken windows, warm freezers, and holes in the floor? I doubt it. But that’s what your site starts to look like when your bells and whistles seem more like sad Christmas decorations.

Offense #2: Soooo Slow
When your 360-degree views take 360 seconds to load, I’m going somewhere else. We’re not going to spend money with you if your site takes takes longer to load than Healthcare.gov. It’s just so much easier to spend money on your competitor’s snappy site than to wait around for your antiquated sever.

Offense #3: Privacy Suspicions
Your cookies leave a bad taste in my mouth. Even with all of the tracking you’re doing, you still send my friend Bill emails for your semi-annual dress blowout sale. You do realize, right, that Bill is a 25-year-old male? Don’t you know what to do with all of our data you’re collecting? If I trust you enough to give you the privilege of tracking me online, then at least use that privilege to send me and Bill content that says you know something about who we are.

Oh, and one more thing—after we give you all of this data, please lock it down so we’re not hearing on the news over our morning coffee that our credit card information or email address has been ripped out of your system because of a minor mistake.

Offense #4: The Layout Maze
You were so anxious to launch your site that you forgot that people have to navigate their way around it. It’s like you built a beautiful new building and forgot to put in doors and stairwells. If I stumble about for too long I just start drifting away from the products that interested me in the first place. If I’m totally lost, my first impulse is to give up and go to the next site. You’d have to be so much cheaper than anyone else in town for me to pick up the phone or actually visit the brick-and-mortar store. If you haven’t thought about how the site is supposed to flow, don’t expect me to waste time trying to figure it out either.

Offense #5: Mobile Monstrosities
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everyone on the planet has a smartphone. So it’s time you took your desktop site and made it dazzle on the smaller screen. Not big on going small? Well, you’ll be missing all the dollars that I’m spending when I’m on my phone and waiting in line or for a lunch date. People love browsing sites while they wait; they even check online prices while they’re standing in the middle of a Best Buy. So if your mobile site is only accessible for a six-year-old’s fingers, then it’s time you matured your offering. It only takes a few failed taps before I bounce on down the information superhighway.

If you’ve received this letter in error, please accept my apologies. I’ll be buying with you shortly. And if you see some of your site on this list, know that it’s not the end of the world. You can change. We’re the forgiving sort when something great comes along.

Signed,

Disgruntled Web Shopper

___________

The ecommerce experts of Rackspace Digital are helping brands, big and small, to generate happier correspondence from their online customers.

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Lizetta Staplefoote is a Rackspace Marketing Copywriter with a decade of experience writing about small business challenges for healthcare, real estate, and technology. Her passion is researching and writing about the impact of cloud computing. When she's not wordsmithing, she enjoys hanging out with her sons, exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains, and feeding her music addiction.